Flying-Car Photos Imagine the Future We Were All Promised

The flying car is a symbol of fantastical, futuristic optimism colliding with reality. It’s shorthand for our inability to predict the future and our simultaneous refusal to stop, even in the face of our incompetence. We dream about driving flying cars in childhood and never outgrow the fantasy of their existence no matter how well we understand the obstacles.

That’s why French photographer Renaud Marion‘s series Air Drive is spreading fast on the interwebs. The photos of everyday cars hovering on the ground without wheels take viewers into the alternate reality that never was and might never be.

“When I was a child, and as many children, I was dreaming that we would have flying cars and I was truly believing that we would get to that,” Marion says.

Though there has been some movement toward a viable flying car, the prototypes so far are nowhere near as effortless and graceful as the cars portrayed in Back to the Future or The Jetsons. The company Terrafugia is inching toward getting the Transition on the road. It’s sometimes been called less a flying car and more a drivable airplane, but it’s still one of the closest things we have to people waking up in the morning and transitioning from the streets of their neighborhood to the skies overhead.

Influenced by the famous French comic book artist Jean Giraud (aka Moebius), as well as movies like Blade Runner and Star Wars, Marion says he chose older models to photograph because those are the kinds of cars he was around as he grew up in France in the 1970s and ’80s and fantasized about what the future held.

Marion, 37, lives in Paris but says all the cars were photographed in Geneva, Switzerland, because that city has a better selection of the automobiles he was looking for. Along with the help of a photo retoucher, Marion says he erased the wheels, and then pasted the new cars onto different backgrounds also shot around Geneva.

He only has six images so far but says he’s working on another six. The photos aren’t meant to foretell the future — we probably won’t be recycling old Cadillacs for flying cars — but they imagine existing streets filled with these contraptions from the future. The photos allow us to skip all the real-world hurdles of fuel, technology and infrastructure, and simply wonder, “Wouldn’t it be cool if ….”